The Affordable Care Act — a.k.a. "Obamacare" — has lowered women's monthly expenses by eliminating the cost of birth control pills. But that isn't, and won't be, the case for employees of several organizations that are mounting legal challenges to the birth control mandate — which was supposed to go into effect nationwide on Jan. 1 — claiming that providing birth control to their employees, via healthcare plans, violates their religious freedom. The Obama administration has defended the requirement as one of the key preventative measures "essential to women's health." But the ultimate fate of the law's enforcement for all rests in the outcome of the court cases against it. Here are three major ones to watch, though there are dozens of others pending around the country.

Reason for Challenge: The nonprofit group of Catholic nuns, who run homes for the needy and aging, claims that under the law, its workers "would be required to actively facilitate and promote the distribution of [contraception] services in ways that are forbidden by their religion." More specifically, the group objects to even signing the form that exempts religious-affiliated nonprofits from enforcement, allowing them to essentially pass responsibility for providing birth control on to their insurance companies. Little Sisters' lawyer says "they cannot deputize a third party to sin on their behalf," though the government says their church-affiliated, third-party insurer isn't even the type that's required to provide contraceptive coverage. In other words, the suit is a mere political test case, the Obama administration contends.

Status: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who oversees legal requests from the group's Denver-based judicial circuit, granted a temporary stay on Dec. 31 that stopped the group from being fined for violation of the requirement. The Obama administration responded in a court filing Jan. 3, saying that the law didn't place an undue burden on the group because of the exemption allowed. Now Sotomayor must rule on whether to keep the stay in place or turn it over to the full court.

Challenger: University of Notre Dame

Ground for Challenge: The school is among several Catholic organizations that have brought suits objecting to the Obama administration's compromise exemption, saying that passing responsibility on to their insurers still requires them to implicitly participate in a practice they deem morally objectionable, a similar objection to that of the Little Sisters. Notre Dame also sued the administration over the birth control mandate back in 2012, but the case was dismissed as premature.